Something's Up

These brain teasers rely on your ability to recognize groups of common attributes. For each of these puzzles you'll need to figure out why the words or letters are grouped as they are. Sometimes you will be asked to pick the odd-one-out or to place a new word into the correct group.

Hint

Answer

final

The solution is based on the ordinal values of the letters in the alphabet. Since "a" is the first letter of the alphabet, it has an ordinal value of 1. Likewise, "b" is the second letter of the alphabet, so it has an ordinal value of 2, and so on for each letter of the alphabet.

If you sum the ordinal values of the letters in each word (i.e. "a" = 1, "b" = 2, "c" = 3,... "z" = 26), then for the word "final", the total of the values is 42. For all of the other words in the group, the total is 56.

Comments

Clever, never would have gotten the title hint. Before reading the hint, my best guess was "because," because (no pun intended) it's the only one that can't be used as a noun (unless you go to the extent of using a reference to an instance of the word "because" as a definition of "becuase").